Today, Explained - One week to midterms, 5000 troops to border

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

THE CARAVAN IS COMING! DISEASE! MUSLIMS! DANGER! LOCK THE BORDER! Or maybe just listen to this episode in which Vox’s Dara Lind separates truth from fiction about the migrant caravan heading to the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you seen Viper Club yet? If not, you're off the hook because it's only showing in New York and Los Angeles, but that changes on Friday when the movie is showing nationwide. You'll know you're in the right movie because it stars Susan Sarandon as a mother struggling to free her captured journalist son, and occasionally Edie Falco will show up. Viper Club, nationwide Friday. It's a movie. Daryl Lind, immigration reporter here at Vox. The Trump administration has announced that it's sending 5,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, anticipating the arrival of a caravan of Central

American immigrants. Let's start at the start. What is this caravan's origin story? So on October 12th, which was a couple of Fridays ago, about 150 or so people started off from the town of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, which is a city that you may have heard of at some point because for a while it had the unofficial title of the murder capital of the world. And so it's not super stable place for people to be. So a group of people set out from San Pedro Sula with the intent of going through Guatemala, through Mexico and seeking asylum in the United States.

How big was this group of people? So it set out from San Pedro Sula at about 150 people. By the time it got to the Honduras-Guatemala border a couple of days later, we were talking about over 1,000 people. Wow. And that largely was because of the coverage in the Honduran media, which took one of the people who had been serving as a spokesperson for the caravan, who was a former member of the legislature who had been in the opposition party,

and the pro-state media kind of turned him into this figure who was deliberately organizing the caravan to undermine the government, even to the point of claiming that he was promising free food and fee payment to people who came along with him. Is it mostly women and children? Is it men? Is it everyone? What's important to bear in mind is that while the caravan is itself a relatively new

phenomenon, the people who are in the caravan are people who are similar to those who have been coming to the U.S. without papers for the last several years. We've seen a shift from this kind of stereotypical, like, oh, people who are crossing into the U.S. from Mexico are single men looking for work who are Mexican. That's not true anymore. It's really shifted over the last several years to people from Central America, particularly the Northern Triangle, Honduras, Guatemala, El

Salvador, often families, and they're often coming not for work, but to present themselves for asylum. How did the United States really start taking notice of this? Was it President Trump? Was it the media? When exactly did that happen? The pattern for this was set by the caravan last spring that I think we talked about at the time. They crossed into Mexico. Fox News started paying attention. A caravan of migrants, at least 1,200 strong,

marching across Mexico toward the United States. Shortly after that aired, Mr. Trump declared, Border Patrol agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the border because of ridiculous liberal Democrat laws like catch and release. Getting more dangerous, caravans coming. That's kind of the same trajectory, but it happened much earlier in the process. The rapid growth of this group by the time they got to Guatemala was already getting the attention of Fox News. And then when they reached the Guatemalan border, Guatemalan security forces

tried to stop them from entering. And then after a several hour standoff, they blinked and stood aside so people could cross into Guatemala. Roughly 3,000 migrants crossed into Guatemala from Honduras on Monday after a standoff with police and riot gear. That put a White House that is never not on high alert into higher alert. Donald Trump did all sorts of saber rattling. He threatened to cut off foreign aid to Honduras if Honduras didn't bring people back who had already left the country. It was never clear how that was going to work. As people went through Guatemala last week, there was already a great deal of pressure on both the Guatemalan and Mexican governments to take care of this issue so that the U.S. wouldn't have to. Problem is that while Mexico has some capacity to do immigration enforcement, Guatemala,

you know, has less so. So it wasn't super equipped to do that. And by the time the group got to the Mexican-Guatemalan border about a week ago at this point, the U.N. estimated it as over 7,000 people, but most of the estimates have been lower than that. But probably about 5,000 people. Where exactly is the caravan right now? And how far away from the United States-Mexico border are they? They crossed into Mexico a little over a week ago. Given the rate at which they've been going since then, they're probably not going to cross into the U.S. for several weeks at least. It was something like 5,000 people a week ago. How big is the caravan now? Do we know? Yeah. The latest assessment that I've seen from the AP that has been with the caravan from the beginning is that we're talking about about 4,000 people who are currently in that group. And that's dwindling. So there's a lot of attrition through the journey through Mexico, especially when the Mexican government is pressuring people

to either stay in Mexico and seek asylum or to go back to their home countries. Do we have any idea what's going to happen to these people in the caravan based on, let's say, what happened to the people in the last caravan? So we can certainly use it as a good guide for how the things that Donald Trump says affect actual policy. Remember when the caravan was coming up in spring, Trump was freaking out about closing the border. President Trump sending two to four thousand National Guard troops to the southern border, warning a horde of illegal immigrants is on the way. That crackdown ultimately led to the zero tolerance policy of prosecuting everybody

who came across and separating families if that's what was necessary. By the time the actual caravan arrived, people weren't paying attention to the border anymore. But this policy crackdown was still very much in effect. So this group arrived. They were told that there wasn't enough room at the San Ysidro port of entry to process 300 people. They were let in slowly over the coming days and weeks. And in the meantime, they stayed in migrant shelters in Tijuana, which is pretty much what happens if you try to present at that port of entry these days. They went in for an initial screening interview to establish whether they had a credible fear of persecution. If they pass that interview, which most people do, they were allowed to stay in the

U.S. and go before a judge and apply officially for asylum. That's a process that takes months or years. And that's really the problem the administration has pointed to when it talks about loopholes. What it means is that people who are here and say that they want asylum can pass that screening interview. Even if they don't ultimately get approved, they're going to be in the U.S. for a while before they get the final decision. So regardless of how it's going to dissipate or how far away these folks are, President Trump yesterday announced that he is going to send 5,000 troops to the border. What reasons did he give for that?

So there are the reasons that Donald Trump might give for that. And then there are the reasons that the Trump administration gives for it. The reasons that Donald Trump gives for it is that this is a very bad thing that is an invasion, that these people are, you know, trying to come illegally and should be told to turn around or stop. And that the U.S. is going to be tough because this is a situation that requires being tough. It is legal to seek asylum in the U.S. even if you don't have papers. And if you present yourself at a port of entry, an official border crossing, and say you want to seek asylum, you are breaking no U.S. law. The more nuanced argument is that,

you know, there are already more people trying to enter ports of entry to claim asylum than the administration says they have space to process. So they're already making people wait. Having a few thousand people trying to come in at a single point would take an already very stressed system and would stress it even more. So the argument being made by the administration is that, you know, you send the armed forces to do things that Customs and Border Protection would otherwise do so that they can be doing the work of immigration enforcement instead of having to do everything else. But the president, the administration, they're sending 5,000 troops to do this and no one even knows if anywhere near 5,000 people are- There will not be. I am confident saying that the caravan that initially inspired all of this is

not going to number 5,000 people when it comes to the U.S. It already doesn't number 5,000 people. I think it's also relevant to point out that what happens between when the soldiers arrive and when the caravan arrives is the midterms. You're saying this could be an optics play because there's an election one week away. We'll put it this way. There are people who have made good faith arguments about this. There are also people in the White House who have said pretty openly

that it doesn't particularly matter if what the president says about the caravan is correct because this is the play for the midterms. You can adjudicate among that and figure out how the decisions are actually getting made how you will. Coming up on today, explain the caravan as a political play. I'm going to go. images. Runtime, 109 minutes. Color? Color. Tagline, a mother's worst fear will become her greatest fight. Tagline on the movie poster, when the government wouldn't help her son, she turned to those who could. Summary on IMDb, a war correspondent gets taken hostage while on assignment,

prompting his mother, impatient with the government's lack of concern, to take matters into her own hands. The mother is played by Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon. Viper Club hasn't won any Academy Awards yet, but that's because the Academy Awards aren't until, like, early next year. The movie's already in L.A. and New York, and it's Nationwide Friday.

Dara, how exactly did this caravan become such a political issue? Is it the second the president said something about it, or is this lingering politics from the last caravan? Gee, Sean, I don't know. You tell me. Is President Trump able to say things without them turning into political issues? Yeah, there's lots of like conspiracy theories about this caravan. Could you run us through some of them? Yeah, no, Trump hasn't blamed Democrats for sending the caravan. But what's happening right now as a large group of people, they call it a caravan. I think the Democrats had something to do with it.

And now they're saying, I think we made a big mistake because people are seeing how bad it is, how pathetic it is. And in that caravan, you have some very bad people. That kind of subtextually opens the door for people like Representative Matt Goetz of Florida to kind of go the extra step and take a clip that was circulating of someone giving money to women who are waiting in a group and say, oh, this is proof that members of the caravan are being paid off to migrate to the United States. Who's giving them the money? Is it Democrats? Is it George Soros? We don't know. That is a thing that a representative of the United States Congress tweeted a couple of weeks ago. And Trump then shared that video clip, although he didn't talk about, you know,

George Soros or anything. That's kind of level one of the subtext to text kind of progression of conspiracy theory. Is it level one like the worst or it gets much worse? Oh, no, it gets worse because what it gets is textually saying someone is sending these people and the subtext of is it George Soros in the context in which George Soros tends to be raised is maybe it's the Jews. So that is where that went in the right wing fever swamp social media world. There was one shot that was on Fox that showed a truck with a Star of David on the back that people were riding in. It was like it wasn't even in the focus of the shot. It was in the corner of the shot. And Fox didn't comment on it. But the right wing fever swamp took that and took these references to Soros. There was also, you know, a guest on Lou Dobbs' show said that this was the work of the Soros occupied State Department and connected the dots and said, oh, this is a plot by the Jews to replace white Americans with foreigners to import people en masse, which is, you know, there's a longstanding idea that Jews are aligned with the kind of lower non-white masses to overthrow the white race.

We appreciate you. You know, it's you and me. We're all brains and no brawn, I guess, is the flip side of this. But this is, you know, that cosmology isn't new, but applying it to the caravan allowed a lot of people not just to freak out about the idea of people coming into the U.S., but to turn it into this is a deliberate plot by our enemies to replace our civilization and to slaughter us. And, you know, we wouldn't be talking about this if it weren't for the fact that someone who believed these conspiracy theories killed 11 people at a bris at synagogue on Saturday morning because of it. On the other side of these extreme outlandish conspiracy claims, you've also got like people saying that there's a bunch of Muslims in this

caravan trying to get into this country illegally, right? Yeah, the Middle Easterners thing is weird. It's all pretty weird, I feel like. Oh, I mean, yeah. I love that I can actually talk about the genealogy of this because I think this is something that a lot of people don't understand the origins of. The president of Guatemala was in the U.S. earlier this month and said something about how they've arrested over some time period, and I don't think he was specific about this, 100 members of ISIS who they've identified as

trying to infiltrate and come into the U.S. That somehow got turned into, I think, 1,000 members of ISIS on Fox News at some point. And that then got turned into there are members of ISIS in the caravan. You got the president of Guatemala saying to a local newspaper down there just last week, they caught over 100 ISIS fighters in Guatemala trying to use this caravan or other processes. He talked to their local newspaper. We don't know. It hasn't been verified. But even one ISIS, even one poison pill is too many in a caravan.

Did he make that shit up? The president of Guatemala has been unwilling to provide any documentation to the press of Guatemala about this. So it's not clear what the truth value of that claim is, but it was made before the caravan started. And then it got picked up after the caravan launched and brought up on Fox News by a talking head. And then the president started tweeting about how there were no Middle Easterners in the caravan. President, one more thing on the caravan. You had said that there were Middle Easterners in the caravan. Can you explain that?

Are you saying there are terrorists in that caravan? Well, there could very well be. There could very well be. And if you look at... Do you know for sure? I have very good information. I have very good information. A lot of reporters wore out a lot of shoes

trying to verify that claim. No one was willing to verify it. The Department of Homeland Security tried to back it up by pointing out that a lot of people who aren't Mexican or Central American have been arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is true, but also not a claim about who's in the caravan. Like, one of the reasons that it's important to realize, to think about this through the lens of TV and the visuals here is the visuals of this large group of people proceeding down a road make it really, you know, it's easy to imagine that no one really knows who all is in there. And like, yeah, you know, with a group that's changing so frequently, that's true that no one really knows who all is in there. And like, yeah, you know, with a group that's changing so frequently, that's true that no one really knows who all is in there.

But the jump from we don't know exactly who is in there right now to these people will invade the United States and we have no way of stopping them is a massive leap. Again, people present themselves at ports of entry to seek asylum or they cross the border and then present themselves to Border Patrol. So we've got the Jews are funding this slash George Soros. We've got their Muslims, ISIS. It's a terrorist infiltration. What are some of the other more outlandish claims and conspiracy theories surrounding this caravan? That Democrats are doing this because they want people to vote illegally in the midterm

elections. I have to say, you know, that's a good one. If that was a Democratic plot, they should have started six weeks ago because like they're not going to get here, man. Recently, the a lot of Fox News folks who are still talking about this, mind you, after a week in which a lot of other people were talking about people in the U.S. getting sent bombs and killed or have said that they are bringing unknown diseases to infect Americans. Such as smallpox and leprosy and TB that are going to affect our people in the United States. I've heard leprosy.

I've heard, I think, scabies. Scabies? Someone was talking about a disease to paralyze your children. I'm not clear what that is. There's a weird seed of truth in this. I was literally on, I toured one of the busiest ports of entry last week. And when somebody who presents themselves for asylum is taken in for processing, the very first thing they do is a medical check because people have been walking for weeks. They're exhausted.

They haven't necessarily been in good medical care. They want to make sure that people aren't going to like show up and die. So there definitely are concerns about, you know, they've seen a lot of a lot of weird diseases in those circumstances. But that's not because people are deliberately trying to infect Americans. bet that sending 5,000 troops to the border right now sends the message to the base that, you know, he's still taking immigration seriously or whatever they might read this as. Can Democrats make a counterplay here that like, hey, we're still the party that understands what asylum is or we are OK with immigration, legal immigration into the country and rally their own base? I think that there are a few things going on. One is that Democrats, they're making the bet that the people who are really fired up about immigration are people who are already going to vote for Republicans, which seems

accurate. As we go into 2020, it's going to be interesting to see how Democrats deal with the very real primary pressure to be progressive on immigration that was super prevalent in 2016 and that is all the more prevalent now while trying to figure out what a good message on immigration is for the general election. Because it's not, you know, you can't really avoid it. Like the president of the United States has made it very clear that every time he's in political trouble, he's going to go back to that well.

It's going to be interesting to see whether Democrats think that the right answer to that is to portray themselves as the pragmatic solution makers who aren't just using this for a culture war. Whether it's to double down on the strategy that Hillary Clinton used, which was to affirmatively defend the idea of diversity and pluralism. Or whether their answer is to just kind of accuse him of not caring about real Americans and always pivoting back to healthcare and tax cuts. Hmm. I guess we'll see. We'll see. Dara Lind is one of the hosts of the Weeds podcast at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm.

I'm the host of the Today Explained podcast at Vox. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of Today Explained. Bridget McCarthy is the editor. Afim Shapiro is the engineer. Luke Vander Ploeg produces, so does Noam Hassenfeld. Catherine Wheeler is our intern. Jillian Weinberger is always here for us.

And the unlikely Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you're still listening to this, you must really, really love the show. Let the world know how you feel by reviewing Today Explained on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks. Dylan Matthews, you're the host of Future Perfect, Vox's new podcast about how to make the world a better place using the knowledge that we have and all of that data.

I told folks about lithium and suicide yesterday. What's coming up in the feed in the coming weeks? So we told you about lithium and coming up after that, we're going to talk to you about chemicals not in water but in the air. We're going to be talking about something called solar geoengineering. And it's a wacky sounding idea to try to cool the planet by faking a volcano. Nice. Is this like a moonshot idea to help global warming? Yeah, it's sort of a break glass in case of emergency idea of like, if we really don't get our act together, and everything's really going to hell, maybe we resort to this. But it has a lot of drawbacks and we get into that. Cool.

Is this like an Elon thing or is this other people? I don't think Elon has gotten into it. I think what people are worried about is that it's pretty cheap. And so if the oceans are rising and they're threatening your country and you can just spray stuff into the atmosphere and cool everything really fast, odds are some country's going to try to do that. Find out more about this on Future Perfect. The episode drops, what, tomorrow, Wednesday?

Tomorrow, October 31st, Halloween episode. And it's like a little freaky. It's a little freaky, a little spooky.